These chaps have been given red shields to distinguish them from the other base I’ve already painted. Historically Liby-Phonecian Spear men were the ‘citizen soldiers’ of the Carthaginian army, so it’s entirely possible each man had a personal shield decoration. Indeed 28mm Ancients gamers do seem to enjoy painting unique shield patterns on their Carthaginian forces, like this fine example from Lonely Gamers.

However I have neither the time nor the patience to come up with twelve uniquely painted shield patterns. Instead I’m going to do each base with a different set of shields as it’s easier and presents a less busy looking army when they’re finally all ranked up. Although of course I could always purchase some 15mm decals and apply them to the flat coloured shields at a later date.

Speaking of ranks, after painting this base I’m left with three more bases to go to complete this DBA army. Another base of Spear men, and two Cavalry bases, one of which is the command group for the army. The two Cavalry bases will be the most fun to paint, so I’ll probably do one of them next. With a little luck I may have at least one DBA army finished by the end of this year!

Here are the two bases of Spear men next to each other and it seems the chaps with the red shields are a little better drilled than the first base I painted. Ranking them up like this does make me wonder if the figures should be presented facing front, with their shields to their right side, but by the gods if I was a soldier on an ancient battlefield I’d certainly be facing shield forward!

Total Votes: 350

I left this poll running for quite some time, because the global situation just seems to have been getting constantly worse this year. Here in New Zealand we’re partially insulated from the sub-prime meltdown by having a simpler banking system, different legislation around mortgages and a high interest rate - which gives our Reserve Bank a fair amount of room to cut rates in an attempt to stimulate our flagging economy.

However trust me it’s still looking pretty grim on our little island in the Pacific so my hobby spending this year has been almost nil as we struggle to pay the mortgage, the other bills, and keep our two boys in daycare/school etc. It seems I’m not alone judging from the results of the poll with less than a third of you stating your hobby spending hasn’t changed at all, while the rest of the voters have reduced their spending by some amount, almost a third of you by a lot.

The game company and figure manufacturers out there must really be feeling the pinch I imagine. Particularly since prices for casting metals have been increasing at the same time. Putting your prices up while your customers are already reducing their hobby spend is a pretty bad place to be in for niche businesses. Tabletop Gaming News regularly features price increase notices from various quarters, and I wonder if we’ll start seeing indie manufacturers closing their doors. I certainly hope not since indie figures really inject a lot of life into this hobby.

Continuing with the doom and gloom, I suffer from mild depression and have noticed that periodically it effects my enjoyment of gaming. Normally I’m a pretty relaxed gamer, having fun in a game as long as it’s close thing regardless of the outcome. However I find if I’m down I seem to devolve into more a win-at-all costs power gamer with a side order of rules lawyer. I dislike gaming at all when I’m in this state of mind, simply because I don’t extract any pleasure from the game itself and usually just end up offending my opponents by being a ‘whiny little bitch’ (their words). In fact I’ve started making a conscious choice not to game when I’m feeling like this because it’s just easier on everybody.

So this next poll we’re running is to do with power gaming - are you a win-at-all-costs kinda gamer or not? Come on fess up!

If you’re a regular visitor you may have noticed I haven’t got a lot of hobby work done this year for a variety of reasons and the same is true of this project unfortunately. I’ve done some minor work around the doors of the left bell tower and finished off the front-piece of the central hall as well as building the back-piece too.

I need to do some more casting of those cursed 1″ x 1/2″ flat gothic tiles to have enough pieces to build the next set of long inside and outside walls. I suspect may also be short of a few other pieces too so hopefully I can dredge up enough Ultracal 30 dust to finish casting.

I’ve given up using those gothic flats for the interior doorways and instead am using the joined gothic square pieces as I have an excess of them cast. I believe they’re meant to be used to build up the double floors needed for the left and right bell towers. However I’ll use painted balsa wood for these square floors as I’d like to make them removable so you can get figures into the towers during play.

The Cathedral is really starting to shape up and I’m considering painting some of the large pieces to keep me motivated. All I need is one big push and I’m confident I’ll be able to finish the major construction work before starting on detailing and finishing off bit and pieces like the flying buttresses etc.

Once that’s done we’ll have to play about 50 games over Mordheim to justify the effort in building this thing!

These figure collections seem squarely aimed at Games Workshop Warhammer Fantasy or Warhammer 40k players and they look like a nice cheap way of throwing together a representation of a GW Fantasy army in a few evenings. Alas at the moment One Monk only sell an Undead Battalion, but it seems they have plans for a range of Fantasy armies, amongst other things.

Given that it takes me a few evenings to paint one GW 28mm scale figure, I’m tempted to buy a few of these PDFs print them out and break out a sharp scalpel to round out my incomplete Warhammer Vampire Counts army. Building a paper army like this is also probably a more cost effective way of trying out a new Warhammer army before committing to purchasing hundreds (or thousands) of dollars of expensive GW figures - assuming you want to try Undead at the moment!

Another good use for this kind of army would be introducing your kids to Games Workshop games without the worry of having them game with your collection of fragile, hand painted figures! I’ll be keeping an eye out for future One Monk releases.

As I mentioned in my last Ancients post, these figures were all painted separately and then glued to their base which was built up and painted around them. This turned out to be less of a challenge that I thought it was going to be, thank goodness. Normally I base my figures and then paint them after I’ve done the ground work around them, but I guess plenty of people go the opposite way, so I don’t quite know what I was concerned about.

At any rate, the Liby-Phonecian spearmen turned out quite nicely I thought. I couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting to paint on the shields of this first unit, so went with a basic bronze finish. One of the advantages of playing Ancients is description of the forces and individuals involved often rely on tiny fragments of ancient text, or have been entirely lost to time. So you can often do whatever you want with the paint schemes.

I plan to paint the shields on each base the same, but vary the shield colours between each of the three bases for a bit of variety. Ideally I’d really like some 15mm round decals to apply to these curved shields for some really fine detail. However I haven’t really explored finding any suitable decal manufacturers in this scale - Veni Vidi Vici look interesting though. Can any of our fine visitors recommend a good supplier of 15mm round decals they’ve used in the past?

The Numidian Auxilia I’m not so happy with as I’ve always had difficulty in painting a darker skin tone. Largely this is because I typically do a couple of rounds of simple highlighting in 15mm, but for darker skin colours this just seems to end up looking muddy. Mind you this base was painted pretty quickly as I found them fairly uninteresting sculpts. Ah well, they are only Auxilia!

All that remains to complete my DBA Carthaginian army is two more bases of Liby-Phonecian Spearmen and two bases of Cavalry, one of which includes the General and his retinue. This next week I’ll probably focus on knocking off the next two bases of Spearmen before concentrating on the Cavalry, which is much more time consuming to paint because of the horses. Then I’m really looking forward to lining them all up and taking some shots of my entire Carthaginian army.

They’ve only just started, but there’s a Flickr gallery up that I for one will be keeping a regular eye on. Even though the voices in my head tend to mutter ‘that’s not a Rhino’ every time I see the redesigned model - yes I’m an old Rogue Trader player.

Can anybody inform me what the original APC is by the way? Something British presumably? And ex some Desert war too judging from the camo scheme. Is it perhaps an M113? That would be a nice bit of self-reference, since the new Rhino model is essentially inspired by the M113 APC.

Via Kotaku.

First up is the Carthaginian War Elephant which was an amusing unit to paint. Hard to believe the War Elephant was an effective unit in Ancient armies, but apparently it was, particularly against cavalry and massed units of infantry. As this elephant miniature featured in my Pinning with Blu Tack tutorial back in late 2006, it’s nice to finally see it complete and varnished.

I had fun finishing this element as I painted the mahout and soldiers separately from the elephant and then fitted them together once dry. I then discovered I couldn’t get the mahout to sit behind the ears, mainly because of the long pole that ran from his right hand to his hip! A little swearing followed by some creative filing fixed that without visible effect on the final piece thank goodness.

The other unit I completed was the single base of Numidian Light Horse in the army. The Numidians were mercenaries for Carthage in the Punic wars. Like the Romans, the Carthaginians used a fair number of mercenary units in their ancient armies. This is reflected in the DBA Carthaginian army list, which is something of a mixed bag of DBA unit types, from Psiloi and Auxilia, Light Cavalry (which is what these Numidians are) to Cavalry, Spears and Elephants.

All these unit types makes them a challenging army to play I think because you’ve got a number of options regarding fighting strength and maneuverability. Compared with the Polybian Roman army I’ve put together, half of which consists of six Blade elements, the Carthaginians are a positive circus. Still it makes them an interesting army to paint and I’m looking forward to seeing them ranked up once they’re done.

Next on the list is a unit of Numidian Spear as Auxilia and possibly a Phonecian Cavalry element. That will leave me the General’s Cavalry element and three elements of Libyan Spear to paint. These remaining six elements will all be a challenge because their close formations mean I can’t use my usual method of painting on the base. The figures are being painted separately and then based and finished, which is something I haven’t really tried before in 15mm scale.

As it’s been a while I’ve warmed up by painting the least interesting units in the army first, four elements of Baleric Slingers or Psiloi as DBA classes them. As a DBA army always has twelve elements, these four bases represent a third of the entire force! So it seems a pity it’s taken me so long to get around to painting them, particularly considering they’re only eight 15mm figures in total.

Ancient slingers were a force to be reckoned with apparently, and in DBA they evidently act as a nice supporting unit to front rank elements. Now they’re out of the way I can paint up some of the more interesting units in the Carthaginian force!

Generally I don’t purchase boosters these days, preferring to buy individual cards from King of Cards locally, or ordering online from Star City Games or Card Kingdom (who accept PayPal btw). However there is certainly some appeal in blowing a few dollars occasionally and seeing if you get anything interesting. I also find random booster purchases occasionally guide your hand towards deck creation if you draw a particularly juicy Rare.

As boosters are usually opened in store and rifled through for decent cards, I was interested to see this recent article on the Magic site which describes the ‘Pack War’ concept. As a fairly new Magic player this is the first time I’d heard of Pack Wars, although it’s obviously not that new a Magic concept.

From the article: in Pack Wars you simply combine one fresh booster pack and three of each basic land (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest) and play that using normal Magic rules as a 30 card ‘mini-deck’. It also works best if you play blind by shuffling the opened booster into the lands without examining the cards.

My gaming mates and I have tried it a couple of times with various boosters and it works surprisingly well, although you do tend to get a little flooded with lands. However the Eventide block adds the new Retrace (video link) keyword to Magic which allows you to re-play certain cards from your graveyard by discarding a land card in your hand. Even as a Magic rookie it’s obvious that Retrace cards will go some ways towards addressing issues with Mana flood that occur to any Magic player occasionally, not to mention make the end game more interesting (and also increase the utility of creatures like Yixlid Jailer).

I suspect our regular Friday Magic gaming lunches will probably become Eventide ‘Pack War’ lunches for the next little while, at least until we collectively tire of purchasing boosters.

The figures look reasonably well sculpted and both the scale and price is right for my tastes, however I have no idea what rule-set these figures are intended for? I assuming they’re designed to be used with Horde of the Things which is a Fantasy variant of the DBA Ancients rules.

Unfortunately after some searching I simply cannot find a distributor for these rules locally or on the web. The rules were created in 1991 so there’s a good chance they’re simply out of print! Can anybody suggest an Australian or New Zealand supplier that might carry a copy of Horde of the Things?

In Wings of War you dogfight various WWI single and double seater aircraft. The game supports any number of players (although 5-6 players is a practical limit) who all act simultaneously. Each aircraft is represented by a card which you move around the playing surface - which can be any flat, clear tabletop. Each aircraft only has three basic statistics: the amount of damage they can receive before being shot down, the deck of cards they use for movement, and the deck of cards they use when firing their machine guns.

The real beauty of the system is the way the decks of cards work. The various planes use different movement decks which reflect the historical flight abilities of that plane. So for example tri-planes like the Fokker DR-1 which were very maneuverable have a set of cards that give you quick side slips and sharp turns, while planes like the Albatross D-III tend to have a smaller set of more graceful movement cards. The various movement decks work well to give each plane a distinctive feel while gaming. Famous Aces comes with four distinct movement decks which enough to give you a fair range of planes to fly.

(more…)

I thought it was nicely executed for a B-grade horror with interesting cinematography and passable acting throughout. The zombies that star in the film are also a lot more malicious than your average brain dead corpse, they’re more like evil zombie ghosts if that makes any sense. Not to mention the hokey WWII back story was pure Pulp!

It has got me thinking I should finish my Pulp Tramp Steamer and dust off my Pulp .45 Adventure rules sometime this year. I can imagine all sorts of fun could be had on the Steamer with a hold full of WWII Nazi vampires or something. Who’s seen ‘Nosferatu’!

I did start the challenge fairly strong, with the three DAK armored platoons I needed primed and ready to paint. It wasn’t long before I’d weathered all my DAK tanks with Marmite and the turrets were finished a week later!

Then things went on the back burner and here we are early June and all I’ve managed to finish and varnish is the two DAK panzers you see above - a IIIJ late and a IV F2. Still I feel a little more inspired now and will try and get some more of this army painted this year. How did everybody else go?

Battlefront are increasing their prices on average 11% across their range of figures and vehicles in one week. Rulebooks and gaming accessories (dice, templates) are not increasing in price. It’s been over three years since our local New Zealand market has seen a price increase from Battlefront and I personally haven’t bought any Flames of War figures for almost exactly two years so I can’t really complain!

The good news is that while Battlefront are about to increase their prices, we’ve been promised those prices will stay in place for at least another two years, so once again we really have no grounds for complaint. The way Battlefront treat their customers still makes me glad I play their games, almost makes me wish I’d given them more of my money in fact! Which reminds me weren’t their vague rumors a while back about them starting a new period game system? Whatever happened to that? Daniel - you’re our resident Battlefront guru, any ideas?

I ordered two baggies of Squad Support Weapons and two baggies of Sci fi Human and Halfling guns from Hasslefree. They arrived promptly and well packed in a bubble wrap envelope. Nothing was damaged or required straightening which is good considering the distance they had traveled to reach me in New Zealand.

In the photo above you see a couple of the white metal sprues as I took them out of their baggies. There was a moderate amount of venting spikes on both of them, but they were all easily flicked off with an Xacto blade. There were no prominent mold lines, but I did spend around five minutes per spure taking the weapons off and tiding them up with a needle file.

(more…)